Spectacles of Promise and Disappointment: Political Emotion and Quotidian Aesthetics in Video Installations by Berni Searle and Zanele Muholi

This paper reframes post-apartheid everyday life against the backdrop of the spectacles of promise and disappointment that have characterized South African public culture in the transitional and post-transitional periods. Inspired by recent work in the field of affect theory that reads negative affect as a potential political resource, I consider iconographies of struggle and difficult emotions in an effort to study disappointment as a form of …